(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic document feeder device and an image forming device provided with a feeder that feeds documents stacked in a feeder tray to a document reader of a document reading device and ejects the read documents to an output tray. Particularly, the present invention relates to a technique for automatically opening and closing a device body of the automatic document feeder device relative to the document reading device.
(2) Description of the Related Art
In general, according to the image forming device as described above, the device body of the automatic document feeder device is hingedly connected to the document reading device by a hinge connector. By pivoting about a hinge shaft of the hinge connector, the device body is opened and closed. In recent years, in order to improve the operability of the device and to be more user-friendly for the handicapped, an automatic assist opening/closing system for automatically opening and closing the device body according to user's button operation has been proposed (JP-A-H07-271115, JP-A-2006-50225).
However, according to the image forming device provided with the automatic assist opening/closing system, when the device body is widely or abruptly opened, documents stacked on the feeder tray and/or the output tray may fall off. Particularly, when an amount and/or a size of the stacked documents is large, the documents are likely to fall off.